Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292

Peru 1957–1977: How time and place influenced John Turner’s

ideas on housing policy

Ray Bromley*

Department of Geography and Planning, State University of New York at Albany, Arts & Sciences 224,

Albany, NY 12222, USA

Received 27 August 2002; accepted 3 September 2002

Abstract

John F.C. Turner worked in Peru for several periods between 1957 and 1965, and he developed many of

his ideas on aided self-help housing on the basis of his Peruvian experiences. His most famous publications

on housing policy, several of them co-authored with the American anthropologist William Mangin who

also worked in Peru in the 1950s and 1960s, make extensive use of Peruvian examples. This paper describes

Peru in the periods when Turner was there, and in the succeeding decade, pointing out distinctive

characteristics of the country and its housing, and outlining the major housing policy debates which raged

among Peruvians. Publishing in English in major international journals, Turner was able to draw on

abundant Peruvian research, ideas and expertise, and to graphically present Peru’s urban squatter

settlements (barriadas) to a global audience. The contrasting ideas of Fernando Bela !unde, Pedro Beltr!an

and Carlos Delgado were particularly influential, leading to innovative government programs. Turner drew

on all three of them to some degree, but found his own distinctive middle ground.

r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Aided self-help housing; John F.C. Turner; Fernando Bela !unde; Pedro Beltr!an; Carlos Delgado; Peru

1. Introduction

In a characteristically brief and modest self-description, John Turner presents himself as

follows:

Born in London in 1927, I was schooled in England and trained as an architect. I have worked

mainly in the field of housing. Reoriented by working with self-managing home and

*Tel.: +1-518-442-4766; fax: +1-518-442-4742.

E-mail address: r.bromley@albany.edu (R. Bromley).

0197-3975/03/$ - see front matter r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

PII: S 0 1 9 7 - 3 9 7 5 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 4 9 - 8

neighbourhood builders in Peru (1957–65), I have learnt that what matters in housing are the

relationships between people, activity and place. Before leaving South America, I prepared a

publication and the script of a documentary film showing how much more people can do than

can be done for them, with so much less when free to decide and act for themselves.

Opportunities followed to observe and interpret the same facts in other contexts.1

Turner’s work in Peru, some of it in association with his first wife Catherine S. Turner, the

British architect Patrick Crooke and the American anthropologist William Mangin, provided the

basis for a series of highly influential publications (e.g. Turner, 1963, 1965, 1967, 1968a, b; Turner,

Turner, & Crooke, 1963; Mangin, 1963, 1971; Mangin & Turner, 1968, 1969). These publications,

and textbook readers edited by Mangin (1970) and Turner and Fichter (1972) drew so heavily on

Peruvian cases that the ‘‘Turnerian vision’’ of urbanization, housing and community development

in developing countries was in many senses derived from Peru.

This article describes Peru over two decades, starting with the years when John Turner was

visiting the country for extended periods (1957–1965) and continuing through to 1977, the year

when the most ambitious national community development program, known as Sinamos, was

dismantled.2 Turner worked in Peru during a period of vigorous national debate about housing

policy, community development and aided self-help, and this debate intensified after he left the

country, and particularly during the military government of General Juan Velasco (1968–1975).

Peru was not just a site for design and field observation by a visiting British architect. It was an

exceptionally interesting centre of housing policy debate, with two contrasting schools of thought

led by Fernando Bela !unde (1912–2002) and Pedro Beltr!an (1894–1979), and a third emerging

school, which was particularly identified with Carlos Delgado (1926–1980).3 Contrasting views on

housing policy were linked to much broader debates on city planning, political ideology, and the

nature of democracy.

During numerous assignments in Peru between 1957 and 1965, Turner was able to observe and

participate in those debates, and to study and advise several reconstruction and upgrading

projects in Peruvian shanty towns, usually known locally as barriadas. He had originally been

invited to work in the southern city of Arequipa by Eduardo Neira, a young Peruvian architect

whom he had met at the International Congress of Modern Architects (CIAM) in Venice in 1950,

who shared his interest in the ideas of Patrick Geddes, and who had studied planning at the

University of Liverpool. From 1953 till 1959, Neira served as Director of the Department of

Urbanism in the Peruvian Ministry of Public Works, and he had been instrumental in establishing

OATA, a pilot program to improve the physical condition of Arequipa’s barriadas.4 Soon after

Turner joined the program, Arequipa was hit by a major earthquake in January 1958. In the

1http://www.wtp.org/Talks/TurnerBio.html. August 8, 2002.2 Ideas for this paper were developed during numerous visits and extended periods of work in Peru between 1970 and

1998, including a period in 1981–1985 working as a USAID-sponsored advisor to the second Bela !unde Government. I

am especially grateful to the Fulbright Commission for a Senior Fellowship in Lima in 1997, and to the UNI and

DESCO for hosting that stay.3 In Peru most people use both their paternal and maternal surnames, but names can always be shortened to use only

the paternal surname. The fuller names used in library catalogs (paternal surname underlined) are: Pedro G. Beltr!an

Espantoso, Fernando Bela !unde Terry, and Carlos Delgado Olivera.4OATA’s full title was Oficina de Asistencia T!ecnica a las Urbanizaciones Populares de Arequipa. Eduardo Neira’s

role and Turner’s experience in Arequipa are documented in Chavez, Viloria, and Zipperer (2002) and Turner (1972).

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292272

aftermath of the earthquake, and with some support from national and international aid efforts,

the Ministry of Public Works expanded its efforts in the city, and Turner advised and promoted

self-help rebuilding efforts. In this effort, he was able to draw on the one major source of Spanish-

language aided self-help manuals, the materials prepared in Puerto Rico from 1939 onwards as

local housing and community development specialists developed innovative pilot projects and

linked up with US federal agencies to widen their application (Turner, 1972, p. 128; Spohn, 1972,

pp. 22–23). The Puerto Rican experience had been closely observed and supported by Jacob L.

Crane, who coined the term ‘‘aided self-help housing’’ around 1945 and who, as Head of the

International Office of the US National Housing Administration (subsequently Housing and

Home Finance Agency) from 1945 to 1954, promoted the concept to US officials and

international development agencies (Harris, 1997).

Building on his Arequipa experience and his growing network of contacts among Peruvian

architects and planners, in the early 1960s, Turner worked in various technical assistance and

research projects in Lima, the capital city. Some of the architects who worked with him in Lima

have described him to the author as quite fluent in Spanish, creative, genuinely interested in

discussion and debate, and especially concerned with low-income housing and the barriadas.5

Turner worked in Peru at a formative period in his career, and during an eventful period of world

and national history. Even though he was no longer a participant observer, events and debates

intensified in Peru after 1965, and analysis through to 1977 is vital to understanding the potentials

and limitations of different housing policies, and particularly the ‘‘aided self-help’’ approach

which Turner and his co-authors so strongly recommended in their mid-1960s publications.

2. The peculiarities of Peru

There are many reasons why Peru has featured prominently in discussions on housing and

urban development, and particularly in discussions on self-help housing in the developing world.

John Turner and his co-authors made a major contribution to making the Peruvian case better

known internationally, but even if they had not published their case studies and policy proposals,

Peru would still be quite well known and frequently discussed. Academic and policy writing about

Peru is widely read because the country is physically spectacular, has a rich history and natural

resources, and is one of the major nations of Latin America. Its principal language is Spanish, a

major world language, and it has deep-rooted intellectual and cultural traditions. The writings of

Peruvian social scientists, architects, historians, novelists and political commentators are

abundant and often excellent, providing a rich store of data and ideas which is readily available

to visiting researchers and consultants. In the global league table of developing countries, Peru

occupies an intermediate location: not high enough, like Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, to have

had genuine aspirations to developed country status; not low enough like Haiti, Afghanistan or

Chad, to acquire an aura of hopelessness. Numerous international flights are available to Lima,

5 I am especially grateful to Diego Robles and Nicholas Houghton for an interview in 1984, to Marcia Koth, Ernesto

Paredes, Carlos Williams, Eduardo G !omez de la Torre, Carlos Franco, Francisco Guerra, Julio Cotler, Carlos Reyna

and Gustavo Riofr!ıo, for information provided in 1997, and to William Mangin for information provided during an

extended interview in December 2001.

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292 273

and Cuzco and other areas of the country offer world-class tourist attractions. Peru has several

five-star hotels to cater to the tastes of the international development jet set, but mass poverty

surrounds the enclaves of wealth. In short, it encapsulates the problems of the third world, and it

is attractive to many first world visitors.

Peru is usually divided into three major natural regions, the desert coastlands, the Andean

highlands, and the vast and sparsely populated Amazonian lowlands. Most settlement is located

in the coastlands and in the Andes, and settlement is usually highly visible because of the rugged

terrain and relative lack of vegetation in these regions. Rain is rare on the desert coast, and visual

contrasts between city, sea, desert, irrigated farmland and mountains are very striking.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Peru still had fascinating indigenous traditions, with ancient modes of

agriculture and handicrafts, vernacular architecture, folkloric dress, music and festivals, and many

people speaking Quechua and Aymara. Nevertheless, the country was at its peak of population

growth and urbanization, with massive migration from rural areas and small towns to the coastal

cities, and with those cities growing by 5–10 percent each year. Between 1940 and 1972, the

national population rose from 6.2 to 13.5 millions, and the percentage living in the primate city of

Lima in the central coastlands rose from 9 to 25.

In the coastal cities, most urban development is outward into the surrounding desert, and on

the poorer and more mountainous sides of the city, it generally takes place through organized

squatter invasion of the desert. A few small-scale urban land invasions occurred before 1945,

when the Peruvian population was still predominantly rural, but the great majority of invasions

have occurred since then (Collier, 1976, pp. 48–49). The invasion process is facilitated by the fact

that unsettled desert land is officially virgin land held by the state, and the government has

traditionally been too slow, bureaucratic and politically vulnerable to crack down on squatting.

Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, while urban growth was accelerating, new squatter settlements

frequently appeared on the urban fringe, and the national and local governments usually allowed

them to remain. An elaborate charade emerged, whereby squatter organizers would select and

research possible locations, ensuring that no major government or private-sector projects would

be impeded, and that no wealthy or military interests would be affected. Subsequently, as they

became more established and confident of their de facto rights to the land, the squatters organized

to pirate electricity and water supply and to petition for roads, bus routes, public services, legal

utilities and land titles. Squatting on virgin land is a particularly visible form of urban

development, much easier for the outsider to comprehend than the illegal subdivision, which

prevails in such cities as Bogot!a and Dhaka.

Like most developing countries, Peru had striking inequalities between an impoverished and

marginalized vast majority of the population, a small middle class, and a traditional oligarchic

elite. Those inequalities are highly visible because of the country’s stark terrain, and because the

spatial organization of cities has increasingly separated the rich from the poor, with the emergence

of exclusive suburbs on the most attractive side of each city, and the spread of barriadas on the

other side(s) of the city. The combination of stark terrain, rapid urbanization, organized squatting

and sharp social differentiation between neighbourhoods makes Lima a shanty-town

photographers’ paradise—a very easy city to take the dramatic images which Turner (1963,

1967, 1968b) used so effectively to illustrate his articles. This visual dimension had a special

appeal to architects, planners and geographers, trained in disciplines which emphasize graphic

illustration.

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292274

Just as Turner and Crooke used the visual drama of Peruvian shanty towns to capture the

imagination of architects, Mangin (1959, 1960), Patch (1967) and Doughty (1970) made major

contributions to building urban anthropology as a field, using Peru as a case study. Anthropology

had traditionally been the study of the traditional, rural, remote and indigenous heritage, and

Peru had long been a major focus for anthropological research because of its pre-Columbian

civilizations. In the late 1950s and 1960s, however, Peru was experiencing rapid urbanization,

social science research in developing countries was steadily expanding, and anthropology was

discovering new intellectual opportunities and audiences studying rural–urban migration and

urban social organization. Mangin’s (1970) reader, Peasants in Cities, was global in coverage and

at the crest of the wave, starting with five successive case study chapters on Peru and authored by

Turner, Mangin and Doughty.

The 1960s publications of Turner and Mangin on Peruvian urbanization and barriadas

attracted considerable international intention because they were published in English in a variety

of prominent places, because there was considerable international interest in Peru, and because

the rapid population growth and urbanization of the developing countries was attracting

increased worldwide attention. The worry of most observers, and the hope of some, was that the

new settlers and shanty towns might be revolutionary. Turner and Mangin presented a picture of

continuity, collaboration and progress—a reassuring view for all, who feared violent revolution

against the current social order.

While Turner and Mangin were still doing their background research for future publications on

Peru, several Peruvian researchers were writing and publishing major books on the barriadas in

Spanish, most notably the architect Adolfo C !ordova (1958), the physician Carlos Paz-Sold!an

(1957) and the anthropologist Jos!e Matos Mar (1966), all reporting major surveys conducted in

Lima in the mid-1950s. Their books include very thorough inventories and histories of major

barriadas, they have many photographs, maps, plans and statistical tables, and they describe

community self-help activities and some government support programs in considerable detail.

Thus, the urban housing problems and solutions were not discovered by English or American

visitors. They were well known to some Peruvian experts, but the expatriate researchers played the

lead role in bringing Peru to a global audience. As global housing specialists and development

financing institutions learnt more about the situation in Peru and other developing countries, they

commissioned a new wave of country studies, notably Harris and Hoss!e’s Housing in Peru (1963)

and Dietz, Koth and Silva’s Housing in Latin America (1965).

Turner arrived in Peru quite early in the Presidency (1956–1962) of Javier Prado, an elected

political conservative who enjoyed the pomp and circumstance of being Head of State, but who

had little desire to bring about dramatic changes (Werlich, 1978, p. 266).6 Prado had won the 1956

elections with the support of the outlawed American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA)

Party, defeating Fernando Bela !unde, a young architect who put up a remarkably strong showing

for a first-time candidate. Prado’s government was heavily criticized for its failure to address

major national problems, most notably the plight of peasants and labourers in rural areas where

most of the land was controlled by large estates and plantations, and the poverty, ill health and

lack of services in the rapidly expanding urban barriadas. Prado’s initial response to criticism was

to establish a Commission on Agrarian Reform and Housing (CRAV) chaired by Pedro Beltr!an,

6This was Prado’s second presidential term. He had previously served as President from 1939 to 1945.

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292 275

the country’s leading free-market ideologue and editor of La Prensa, the most conservative and

elitist of the country’s daily newspapers. Eduardo Neira served on the Commission and used the

opportunity to press for the funding of OATA in Arequipa as an experimental aided self-help

program. Prado showed little interest in initiating anything more than pilot programs on the basis

of the Commission’s Report (CRAV, 1957), but in July 1959, facing an increasingly difficult

political and economic situation, he appointed Beltr!an as Prime Minister. During his 2 years as

Premier, Beltr!an made dramatic and unpopular budget cuts, stabilized the economy and currency,

and won praise and support from the US government and international financial institutions.

In the 1962 Presidential elections, V!ıctor Ra !ul Haya de la Torre, founder of the newly

legitimized APRA Party, narrowly defeated Fernando Bela !unde, who had founded the Popular

Action (AP) Party after his 1956 election loss to Manuel Prado. Many senior military officers

disliked and feared APRA because of the party’s role in riots, uprisings and attempted

assassinations in the 1930s and 1940s, and also because APRA had considerable clandestine

support among soldiers and junior officers in the military. The military leadership deposed Prado

in a coup just 10 days before Haya was due to assume the Presidency. The ensuing centrist

Military Junta ruled for a year and convened new elections in 1963. Allying AP with the Christian

Democrat (DC) Party, Bela !unde narrowly defeated Haya in the 1963 elections, and the military

allowed him to take office as President. During the 1960s, however, the military radicalized and

became increasingly frustrated with Bela !unde’s government, and in 1968 Bela !unde was

overthrown in a new military coup. General Juan Velasco assumed the Presidency and ruled

Peru till 1975, when he was deposed and succeeded by General Francisco Morales Berm !udez.

Velasco’s government was the most radical in Peru’s history, and particularly in its early years the

sociologist Carlos Delgado was very influential on agrarian reform, housing and community

development issues. Morales Berm !udez’s government was more centrist, reversing some of

Velasco’s most fundamental reforms. When the military finally decided to give up power and

called elections in 1980, Bela !unde was victorious again and served a full term as President from

1980 till 1985.

3. The Cold War backdrop to Peruvian politics

Behind the democratic facade of Peru’s 1956, 1962 and 1963 elections lay a complex national

and international history which proscribed some candidates and parties, and which stigmatized

and blocked others. This history of political exclusion reflected both worldwide political issues

and the idiosyncrasies of national political history (Astiz, 1969). The principal world issue at the

time, the Cold War, was the dominant political issue in Peru. Since the publication of The

Communist Manifesto (Mark & Engels, 1848), and more dramatically since the Bolshevik

Revolution in Russia in 1917, world political circles were abuzz with the idea that an emerging

proletariat might overthrow the bourgeoisie and install a workers’ state. The Soviet Union

exemplified the idea that communism was politically and economically viable, a technological

powerhouse which could support worldwide revolution. After the end of the Second World War,

with the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and development of nuclear weapons, and with the

Maoist Revolution in China and the partition of Korea and Vietnam, the world was split between

capitalism and communism, and communism seemed to be on the ascendant.

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292276

From 1945 onwards, world opposition to the rise of communism was led and dominated by the

United States, still far richer and significantly more powerful than the Soviet Union, and the hub

of the global economy and mass media. Since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, successive US

governments have viewed the Americas as their ‘‘back yard’’ and focused on maintaining ‘‘free

trade’’ and protecting American investments, businesses and citizens in Latin American countries.

Numerous overt and covert operations have been used to install and maintain ‘‘friendly

governments’’ and to protect political allies, even when those allies are dictators. Nevertheless, a

great shock came at the end of 1958 when Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army took Havana and installed

a revolutionary government in Cuba. Though Cuba was small, the revolution was a massive

political and military humiliation for the US government. After US victory in the Spanish

American War of 1898, Cuba had been a US colony, and then a puppet state, closely tied to the

US market and a playground for US investors, tourists and organized crime. Castro’s revolution

was initially more populist than communist in character, but given the intensity and Manichean

character of the Cold War, Castro was the enemy. After the US financed the disastrous Bay of

Pigs invasion in 1961, Cuba moved into the Soviet Bloc, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

turned Castro’s Cuba from a temporary irritation into an enduring symbol of communist

revolution, an example and potential supporter for insurgencies all over the hemisphere.

The Cuban Revolution encouraged many other insurgencies in Latin America during the 1960s

and 1970s, initially launched from rural mountain and peripheral areas comparable to Cuba’s

Sierra Maestra, but from 1963 onwards also including urban guerrilla movements inspired by

Uruguay’s Tupamaros. The United States and the other governments in the Hemisphere mobilized

swiftly to diplomatically isolate Cuba, consolidating hemispheric support for capitalism through

the Alliance for Progress, established in 1961. The Alliance was a curious mix of military aid,

often given to repressive conservative dictators and reactionary generals, and ‘‘development

aid’’—a package of loans, grants and technical assistance given to more progressive and reformist

elements and governments.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, military aid had a negative dimension, strengthening the

power and prestige of the armed forces, and stimulating military coups in such countries as Peru

(1962 and 1968), Brazil (1964), Argentina (1966), Bolivia (1971), Ecuador (1972), and Chile

(1973). Whether they took power, or merely pulled strings behind the scenes, the military were in

the ascendant because they were responsible for ‘‘fighting communism’’. Latin American

countries were now battlegrounds in the Cold War, and the cost to be paid was often the

installation of a national security state, with substantial powers of internal surveillance, arbitrary

imprisonment, and even the use of torture and disappearance in a ‘‘dirty war’’. The US

government covertly supported ‘‘dirty wars’’, but also promoted the ideas of capitalist progress.

The words ‘‘reform’’, ‘‘development’’, ‘‘redistribution’’ and ‘‘planning’’ were co-opted to indicate

that capitalism could benefit the masses, and that activist capitalist government could swiftly

bring great economic benefits to the poor majority of Latin Americans.

From the mid-1950s onwards, the US government and associated financial organizations such

as the World Bank (IBRD) and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) were seeking

meaningful, politically feasible and relatively inexpensive policies to ensure political stability and

the continuity of capitalism in developing countries. Latin America was considered particularly

vulnerable because of the revolutionary movement in Cuba, the social tensions associated with

population growth, the pressure for agrarian reform in rural areas, and the rapid rate of

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292 277

urbanization. Supporting private property was an obvious policy objective because it helped

defend the rights of the privileged, and simultaneously expanded the population with a vested

interest in social stability and economic growth. Peru’s Prado Administration was an early

recipient of aid to strengthen housing finance, providing technical assistance and loans to support

new Building Societies and Savings and Loans Associations (Zoumaras, 1986, pp. 176–178).

President Eisenhower’s brother Milton records how early in 1960 the President ‘‘had been

particularly inspired by a visit to a low-cost housing project in Santiago (Chile). The government

has provided land, utilities and foundations for nearly five thousand homes. The people

themselves were building their houses, mostly of large wooden blocks which fascinated the

President. He walked among thousands of low-income families, talked with them, and visited in

their homes. They showered him with flowers. Some hugged him’’ (Eisenhower, 1963, p. 248). The

ideas of ‘‘aided self-help’’ and ‘‘sites and services projects’’ were alive and well, and influencing US

Latin American policy. In September 1960, through Public Law 86-735, funding and technical

assistance for ‘‘aided self-help housing’’ became the official US policy towards Latin America. It

was assumed that ‘‘the Latin American governments would assist in acquiring land, the

prospective owner would provide the labour, and (the US) would give technical assistance and

help finance the cost of materials’’ (Eisenhower, 1963, p. 250).

During the Kennedy (1961–1963) and Johnson (1963–1969) Administrations in the US, a broad

consensus emerged that the military could not win a war on communism unless development

programs could be launched to win the hearts and minds of the impoverished and marginalized

masses in Latin America. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address of January 20, 1961 challenged a new

generation of Americans to join ‘‘a grand and global allianceyto fight tyranny, poverty, disease,

and war’’. He continued ‘‘To those people in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to

break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves’’. By the

end of 1963, 7300 Peace Corps volunteers were in the field, serving in 44 countries, and by June

1966 more than 15,000 volunteers were in the field.7 Peru was substantially involved in the early

Peace Corps efforts, and William Mangin served as Deputy Director and then Director of the

Peru Program. Thus, self-help and community development were enshrined at the centre of

development discourse, emphasizing that the Cold War and the development effort were primarily

struggles for the hearts and minds of ordinary people throughout the world, and that development

efforts had to reach every household and home in the poor nations. Responding to the

Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations’ new emphasis on development programs for poor

nations, including self-help housing, the US Congress (1962, 1963) held hearings on international

housing policy. The sixties was also a period of rapid expansion of higher education in the US and

Western Europe, and universities substantially increased the volume of coursework and research

on international development, population growth and urbanization.

4. Peru in the cold war world

Peru was one of the first countries after Cuba to develop substantial insurgent and guerrilla

movements in the mountainous interior. A wave of peasant uprisings led by the Trotskyist Hugo

7http://www.peacecorps.gov/about/history/decades/60s.cfm. August 11, 2002.

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292278

Blanco occurred in the La Convenci !on area east of Cuzco between 1958 and 1962 (Blanco 1972).

In 1965 two guerrilla groups known as the MIR and ELN, inspired by the Cuban Revolution,

began operations in four different areas of the highlands and were suppressed within a few months

by the determined action of the armed forces (Bejar, 1969; Werlich, 1978, pp. 285–286). The

pressure of the insurgencies and the rising wave of development aid associated with the Alliance

for Progress stimulated centrist political parties promising accelerated development. For

politicians, the mandate was to bring about dramatic socio-economic progress while supporting

the military campaign against internal subversion. For military officers, the old code of

professionalism, which viewed the military as an arm of the state, was being replaced by a national

security doctrine which enshrined the military as the heart of the state and the ultimate guardians

against both internal dissent and external invasion. Military officers became increasingly

convinced that the war on communism had both civil and military dimensions and could be

facilitated by establishing a military government.

Since national independence in 1820, Peruvian political radicalism has taken many curious

turns. Anarchism, communism and socialism were all widely discussed in radical circles in the

1910s, 1920s and 1930s, and the example of the US New Deal inspired many Peruvian intellectuals

to envision a strong and more active state, building infrastructure, promoting industrialization,

and providing a much broader range of services. Trotskyism, and later Maoism, emerged as ultra-

radical communist alternatives to Marxism–Leninism. The most Peruvian of all radical

movements was the APRA Party, founded by Haya in 1924 and bathed in ideological confusion.

Many of its early leaders were middle class and from the northern coastal cities; yet Haya founded

the movement from Mexico announcing it as a Pan-American Party, and later describing it as

‘‘Indo-American’’ and anti-imperialist. As Aprismo gathered momentum in Peru, it presented

itself as a socialist revolutionary movement of workers and peasants, sponsoring strikes and

demonstrations, and then a failed 1932 uprising in Trujillo. The result was great bitterness

between APRA’s rank-and-file membership and Peruvian military leaders, and the approval of a

clause in the Constitution of 1933 which outlawed ‘‘political parties of international organization’’

a clause which was intended to exclude communism, socialism and Aprismo from formal

participation in electoral politics. The APRA leadership gradually moved to the political centre,

and the ban on APRA was eliminated after they supported Manuel Prado’s successful election

campaign in 1956. In contrast, the ban on communist candidates continued till the approval of a

new Constitution in 1979.

Three important new parties were founded in 1956 to compete with APRA for the political

centre: Bela !unde’s AP, DC, and Social Progressivism (MSP). APRA, AP, DC and MSP shared

many common ideas, but in different ways they reflected the national heritage of personalism and

factionalism in politics, accentuated by the weakness of democratic institutions resulting from the

country’s long history of military coups and suspensions of constitutional rights. Trying to avoid

accusations that they were ‘‘political parties of international organization’’ APRA, AP, DC and

MSP all sought ‘‘a third way’’ based on Peru’s national heritage—neither capitalism, not

communism, but a middle road which facilitates peaceful progress. Peru’s Catholic traditions

provided a vital starting point, explicit for the DC, and implicit for the other three parties. From

the promulgation of the encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891 till Vatican II (1962–1965) and the

promulgation of the encyclical Populorum Progressio in 1967, the Catholic Church gradually

developed a Social Doctrine calling for reforms and economic redistribution designed to maintain

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292 279

the allegiance of the masses, and thus to frustrate communist revolution. The central ideas are

cooperatives, corporatism (the organization and representation of functional interest groups), and

collective bargaining, whereby a strong state brings the representatives of capital and labour to

the negotiating table, persuading both to be reasonable and compromise in the national interest

(Mich, 1998).

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, APRA and AP were the dominant centrist parties with strong

charismatic leaders and a membership mixing centre-left and centre-right tendencies. The DC was

smaller, lacking strong leadership but also mixing centre-left and centre-right tendencies. The

MSP was smaller still and consisted mainly of centre-left Lima intellectuals. It never attracted

much voter support because it had no charismatic leader and because its members seemed much

more interested in research and planning than in electoral populism and the rough and tumble of

parliamentary politics. Nevertheless, the MSP and the more radical sections of the DC had a

major influence on Peru’s future because several of their leaders taught in the Centre for Higher

Military Studies (CAEM), the national academy for outstanding young military officers. As a

result, planning, cooperatives and worker management emerged as major priorities among the

radical military officers who gained some governmental experience under the 1962–1963 Military

Junta, and who formed the majority in General Velasco’s 1968–1975 military government

(Villanueva, 1972). The radicalism of the Peruvian military in the late 1960s was deeply committed

to finding a distinctive Peruvian third way; nationalist, Catholic, anti-capitalist, anti-communist,

and tercermondiste (Einaudi, 1976).

Among the nations of Latin America, Peru has one of the strongest and oldest senses of

nationalism. The dominant element is a deep sense of pride that Lima was the administrative

centre of Spanish colonial rule in South America, and thus embodies Spanish administrative,

religious, military and cultural traditions. As a primate city about ten times the size of Arequipa

and Trujillo, the next-largest cities, Lima still maintains a striking degree of intellectual, financial

and administrative preeminence over Peru, a country which is now much smaller than the

preceding Colonial Viceroyalty. Just as Peru, focusing on Lima, was a centre for authoritarian

Spanish rule, it was also part of the vast Inca Empire, one of the three great civilizations

conquered by the Spanish when they incorporated the Americas into their colonial empire.

Highland Peru, centred on Cuzco, the old Inca capital, represents a vital secondary dimension to

Peruvian nationalism—the depth of pride in indigenous civilization, and the heritage of South

America’s greatest indigenous rebellion against colonialism, the movement led by T !upac Amaru

II in 1780–1782. Along with Mexico, Peru’s nationalism is heavily tinged with pride in a great

indigenous and colonial past, and resentment that much of the grandeur and territories of the past

have been lost to other nations.

A vital theme in Peruvian nationalism, shared across the political spectrum, is the belief that

Peru has a heritage of communal activity and organization. The Inca Empire and many of the

indigenous civilizations that preceded and sometimes co-existed with it, was in no sense

‘‘capitalist’’. In comparison with their contemporaries in most other parts of the world, the

civilizations of ancient Peru had extraordinary engineering and agricultural technologies, excellent

communications, and an impressive system of warehousing and inter-regional trade. Lands were

held and used in common by the indigenous communities (ayllus). They also had traditions,

known in Quechua as the minga and the faena, whereby teams of community members built

public works, and neighbours helped one another in such tasks as planting and harvesting crops,

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292280

repairing roads and canals, and roofing houses. Individualism and competitive behaviour were

suppressed in many fields of social and economic activity, and communal organization and

ownership were emphasized. To the Peruvian socialist Hildebrando Castro Pozo (1924), to the

leading early Peruvian Marxist Jos!e Carlos Mari!ategui (1928), and to the renowned French

scholar Louis Baudin (1940), the Incas had a sophisticated form of socialism. This led them to

argue that the Spanish Conquest had been totally negative, destroying indigenous civilization and

values, and replacing them with individualism, exploitation and mass poverty. In contrast, the

famous conservative philosopher V!ıctor Andr!es Bela !unde (1943), uncle of Fernando Bela !unde,

argued that ancient Peru was notable for communal organization and cooperation, but it lacked

Christianity, writing, the wheel, a global view, and the great philosophical traditions of the

Renaissance. Peru’s great merit, therefore, is in its unique blend of indigenous and Spanish

cultural traditions, rather than in its indigenous heritage or its Spanish heritage. Just as

Europeans and Native Americans have mixed ethnically in Peru for almost five centuries, their

cultures have blended to create a unique Peruvian culture. In this vision, the communal traditions

of the ayllu, minga and faena are positive attributes which persist in indigenous communities, and

which represent a distinctive Native American contribution to Peru’s national character. Just as

the Spanish brought new forms of individualism, competition, entrepreneurship and economic

organization, leading gradually to the development of capitalist corporations in Peru, Peruvians

are also seen as having a natural propensity to organize communally, work together, and

volunteer.

Both from left and right, therefore, there is extensive Peruvian scholarship that links the

nation’s indigenous traditions and rural communities with communal organization and land

ownership. Whether or not Peru has more communal organization than other Latin American

nations is uncertain, but Peru certainly has a twentieth century history of discussion, assertion and

policy-making about communal organization. Communal organization embodies Peruvian

nationalist and democratic values, and it represents a resource of labour vital to a poor country

where investment capital is always scarce. In the 1950s and 1960s, significant areas of the country

were still owned and operated by ‘‘indigenous communities’’, communal forms of land tenure by

Native American groups.

5. Bela!unde, Beltr!an, Delgado, and housing policy

Fernando Bela !unde has a credible claim to being the most important architect to hold high

political office anywhere in the world. Architects who serve as Heads of State are few and far

between. Some, like Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States from 1801 to 1809, had no

formal training, while others like Sixto Duran Ballen, President of Ecuador from 1992 to 1996,

were remarkably unsuccessful. Opinions about Bela !unde’s successes and failures as President

of Peru are quite mixed, but taking into account both his Presidential terms, 1963–1968 and

1980–1985, he was one of the nation’s longest-serving Presidents, and when he died in June 2002

he was acclaimed as a true democrat and a great Peruvian. In 1968 he was deposed and exiled, but

he was vindicated by the Peruvian people when the military finally relinquished office and he was

re-elected President in 1980. Though corruption was far from absent in Bela !unde’s party and

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292 281

governments, he maintained an impeccable personal reputation as someone who never enriched

himself from political office.

Bela !unde came from a prosperous Arequipa family, which included several notable lawyers,

intellectuals, politicians and diplomats. In 1919 his father was exiled from Peru, and Fernando

continued his education in Europe and the United States, graduating as an Architect in 1935 from

the University of Texas at Austin. He returned to Peru in 1936 and joined other foreign-educated

architects in a successful campaign to establish architecture as a profession in Peru. In 1937 he

established and edited a journal El Arquitecto Peruano (Zapata, 1995). In 1943 he began teaching

in the newly established Architecture Department at the National Engineering School, which later

became the Architecture School in the National Engineering University (UNI). In 1944 he helped

found the Institute of Urbanism of Peru, and the Institute later became a Graduate Training and

Research Centre at UNI. In 1945 he was elected to Congress as one of the leaders of the National

Democratic Front, which supported the presidential candidacy of Jos!e Luis Bustamante y Rivero.

For a time, after Bustamante y Rivero’s election in 1945, Rafael Bela !unde, Fernando’s father,

served as Prime Minister, and Fernando played the leading role in promoting three new housing

laws: a condominium law to facilitate ownership of apartments in apartment blocks,8 the

establishment of the National Urban Planning Office (ONPU), and the creation of a National

Housing Corporation (CNV) as an autonomous public authority. The CNV developed a National

Affordable Housing Plan, which prioritized the construction of unidades vecinales, apartment

complexes targeted at middle income groups and consisting mainly of four-storey walk-up

apartments. Only a few apartment complexes were initiated before Bustamante y Rivero was

deposed by General Manuel Odr!ıa in 1948, but the CNV continued its projects under Odr!ıa.

During Odr!ıa’s corrupt and despotic rule from 1948 till 1956, Bela !unde returned to full-time

teaching at the UNI, and for most of the time he served as Dean of the School of Architecture.

Through his journal, his leading role in professional associations, his teaching and his deanship,

he worked to promote the idea of urban apartment complexes as the dominant element of

national housing policy. The designs he displayed were always modern in style, sometimes 3–4

storey walk-ups, sometimes taller buildings with elevators. The aim was to involve government

directly in designing and financing apartment complexes, in commissioning their construction by

private sector contractors, and in selecting tenants for rental apartments and buyers for

condominiums. He recommended that apartment complexes be located near transport nodes so as

to promote denser, more compact urban development with efficient transportation and utility

networks.

In his energetic first presidential election bid in 1956, Bela !unde developed a distinctive political

philosophy, blending a passion for public works construction, including roads, bridges, dams and

apartment complexes, a fascination for visiting remote communities, and a fervent and highly

idiosyncratic nationalism (Bela !unde, 1959, 1960). Following his uncle’s lead (Bela !unde, 1942), he

emphasized Peru’s unique cultural identity blending indigenous and Spanish institutions and

traditions, the agricultural and engineering sophistication and the social organization of the Inca

Empire, the importance of public works to break down the isolation of the country’s remote

8 In Peru the underlying concept is known as ‘‘propiedad horizontal del suelo’’. It allows each apartment owner to

register his/her property individually, even though all apartments in the building occupy the same piece of land.

Registering apartments individually made it possible for each owner to take out a mortgage on his/her property.

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292282

towns, villages and rural communities, the nation’s rich natural and human resources, and the

potential of communal labour as a means to build infrastructure and increase production

(Bourricaud, 1970, pp. 229–258). His doctrine was nationalist, populist, and anti-communist. He

chose the spade as a symbol for his party, indicating Peru’s enormous potential for agriculture

and public works, and the extent to which the whole population could become involved. His early

followers, mainly young Lime *no professionals including many architects, also traveled widely,

extolling Peru’s heritage and natural wonders, and advocating public works, communal labour

and CNV apartment complexes as the prime solutions to the nation’s problems.

Bela !unde particularly emphasized the role that municipalities and government community

development workers could play in support of communal labour, promising to make Cooperaci !on

Popular (Coopop), ‘‘popular cooperation’’, a major program of any AP government. He explained

his program as follows:

Local problems can and should be solved locallyysupplicatory requests to the government in

Lima should be eliminated andythere is an enormous and infinitely expandable source of

capital in the towns to be released through community action. This immense fountain of capital

can be implemented by means of an organic law decentralizing authority and by which the

government not only provides aid and technical assistance, but also a positive economic

support to function automatically. Such support should be free of bureaucratic routine,y and

not require the intervention of any political bosses. To help he who helps himself; this should be

the motto of this campaign to organize community action. yProperly organized, stimulated

and generalized, cooperaci !on popular in local affairs is truly classical democracyyI have always

proclaimed that this law is fundamentally based in our deep historical traditions, and a

vigorous Peru can, and will, be built upon it.9

Bela !unde’s apartment complexes and Coopop contrasted sharply with the visions of his neo-

Liberal contemporary Pedro Beltr!an. Educated at the London School of Economics and an

admirer of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, Beltr!an campaigned for a small and efficient

state apparatus emphasizing law, order, and fiscal discipline, and for public policies to support

and promote private sector housing projects. In the 1950s’ articles and editorials in La Prensa, he

argued that conditions in the barriadas caused high rates of sickness and mortality, promiscuity,

alienation and delinquency (Beltr!an, 1994, pp. 170–174). He advocated government support for

private sector developers to create many new residential subdivisions on vacant land suitable for

urban development. In a January 1955 editorial, he wrote:

If they are to be an attractive business for the investor, residential subdivisions targeted at the

mass market must receive incentives to assist in their finance. Thus, for example, they must

allow the sale of lots as soon as the plans for the subdivision have been approved, instead of

waiting for all the infrastructure to be completed. The developer will rapidly recover his money

and will depend less on the banks and offer them better guarantees, saving on interest, reducing

the cost of the land, and attracting new buyersyIf new residential subdivision is profitable

business, there is no doubt that private sector capital will become available to urbanize the

unused lands which the state has reserved for this purpose.yOnce each poor family in Peru

9Originally published in Spanish (Bela !unde, 1960). The quote is taken from the English version (Bela !unde, 1965,

pp. 102–104).

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can thus acquire a cheap lot, what has so far been the greatest problem in housing will have

been solved. What remains to be arranged is the individual financing of the house which each

family wishes to build on their land. Mortgage credit is the obvious solution.yDealing with

long-term loans such as mortgages, the only way to obtain the necessary capital is to sell

savings bonds whose interest rates are attractive to investors. To ensure that construction is an

attractive field of investment for private sector capital, the fees and taxes on corporate profits

should be abolished. Other modes of stimulus would be to eliminate taxes on utilities and rent

payments, to make the reinvestment of corporate profits and personal incomes in subdivisions

and affordable housing tax exempt; to exempt the owners of affordable housing from real

property taxes; and evenyexemptions from inheritance tax. (Beltr!an, 1994, p. 173)10

Without using the name ‘‘sites and services scheme’’, Beltr!an was envisaging private sector real

estate developments which would function as sites and services schemes. Government would be

responsible for law, order, property titles and general oversight of location, subdivision and

utilities, real estate developers would play the central role in creating housing opportunities, and

individual plot owners with utilities and property titles would take out mortgages to fund

construction of their houses. Each house would have a design and pace of construction to match

the tastes, circumstances and funding capacity of its owner.

Beltr!an’s housing policy was based on private sector provision of sites and services schemes and

tracts of mass-produced housing on the urban periphery, combined with government support of

private property, corporate investment, Building Societies and Savings and Loans Associations

for housing finance, and the eradication of any new barriadas as illegal squatter settlements.11 In

1960, as Prime Minister, he established a National Housing Institute (INVI), where Turner

worked for a time, and he launched a satellite city project at Ventanilla, 25 kms north-west of

downtown Lima. Ventanilla was designed to be a complete city with industry, services, and 20,000

housing units for 80,000 people in ten neighbourhoods. The housing was low-rise, single-family

development of lots with basic core structures, giving purchasers the option to extend sideways or

build upward sometime after acquiring title. Though USAID and the IDB offered financial

support in 1961, Beltr!an’s departure from the Premiership was a severe blow to the project. Up till

1969, progress on locating industry in the area was very slow and only 2451 lots were developed in

accordance with the original plan (Municipalidad de Ventanilla, 1992, p. 13; Austin & Lewis,

1970, p. 145).

When it took office in 1963, Bela !unde’s newly elected AP–DC coalition government embarked

on an energetic program of public works, popular cooperation, import substitution and agrarian

reform, but on all fronts its achievements were much less than its enthusiastic publicity tended to

suggest. Bela !unde’s lack of a Congressional majority, a difficult national economic situation, his

lack of understanding of economic policy issues, and the emergence of revolutionary movements

in the interior all weakened his first government. Nevertheless, the National Housing Board

(JNV), a successor to the CNV and INVI, developed several apartment complexes in Lima, the

10My translation from the article reprinted in Beltr!an (1994).11 Ironically, in December 1954 Beltr!an had strongly supported Ciudad de Dios, a large squatter invasion which took

place in Lima. He acted as a leader of political opposition to President Odr!ıa, as editor of La Prensa, and as a columnist

on housing policy who argued that only greatly increased private sector involvement in providing sites, services and

housing could solve the emerging urban housing crisis (Collier, 1976, p. 70).

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292284

largest being San Felipe with 1600 apartments for upper middle income families (Austin & Lewis,

1970, p. 138). The AP–DC government held municipal elections in 1963, ending a period of over

40 years in which mayors and councils had been appointed by central government (Austin &

Lewis, 1970, p. 55), but they did not embark on the sweeping political and fiscal decentralization

which Bela !unde had called for before he was elected.

Coopop was launched enthusiastically in 1963 as Peru’s internal equivalent of President

Kennedy’s Peace Corps. Bela !unde pushed Coopop towards ambitious public works projects,

especially roads, but some of the most successful efforts were smaller-scale efforts upgrading

villages and shanty towns. Digging and cleaning drainage ditches, leveling streets, creating small

sports grounds, and building schoolrooms and community centres were among the most popular

projects. The indigenous traditions of the minga and faena were often invoked as a precedent, and

many communal efforts were now branded as Coopop, even if the program was not formally

involved. Nevertheless, results were very mixed, and government support for Coopop was reduced

within 2 years of its ambitious beginnings. Logistic and financial support for the volunteers was

inadequate, many of the public works projects initiated were badly designed or overly ambitious,

and APRA and left-wing politicians and trade unionists often persuaded local groups not to

volunteer to work as a gesture of political opposition to the government. Meanwhile, rumors

spread that some of the most energetic and effective Coopop promoters were political agitators,

and that the organization of community labour would lead the impoverished masses to consider

political mobilization. The enthusiasm and idealism of young AP and DC volunteers in Coopop,

promoting community development and a new democratic vision of Peru, was viewed by many

conservatives as dangerous meddling in the established social order inspiring grass-root demands

which could never be satisfied. The guerrilla insurgencies in Peru’s interior in 1965 were crippling

blows to Coopop, forcing some workers to abandon their posts, and further strengthening the

conservative and Aprista voices that denounced the program as AP demagoguery, exploitation of

labour, and a cover for leftist students hoping to stir up the masses.

If Coopop had focused on the cities and been implemented on a large scale as ‘‘aided self-help’’

barriada upgrading, it could have been the basis for an affordable housing strategy for the

nation’s poor majority. In reality, however, the program was much too small, weak and rurally

focused to have substantial impact in Peru’s major cities. The peripheral barriadas around Lima

and other major cities continued to grow rapidly throughout the 1960s, and the Bela !unde

administration had little to offer in support of these new settlements.

Bela !unde and Beltr!an’s preferred housing projects differed on questions of urban design, with

Bela !unde favouring higher densities and apartment living while Beltr!an favoured lower densities

and single-family houses. Bela !unde sought strategic locations with higher land values, seeking to

raise population density and support transit systems, while Beltr!an advocated new housing and

sites and services schemes on the urban periphery where land was abundant and cheap. Bela !unde

preferred urban renewal, infilling, superblocks and smart growth, while Beltr!an followed an

American model of suburbanization and residential subdivision. Both Bela !unde and Beltr!an

favoured targeting housing construction at the middle class, under the logic that the wealthy could

deal with their own housing needs, and that government should not support the construction of

housing that does not fulfill basic minimum standards comparable to those of Western Europe

and North America. Bela !unde and Beltr!an both recognized that many poor people had

inadequate housing, and that only a minority could benefit from ‘‘trickling down’’ of former

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292 285

middle-class housing. Both of them rejected highly subsidized low-income public housing as a

solution. Instead, they advocated policies which could have formed the basis for large-scale

affordable housing programs; Bela !unde through Coopop aiding community self-help in settlement

upgrading, and Beltr!an through real estate developers creating sites and services schemes on the

urban periphery and in new satellite towns, and through greatly expanded property titling and

housing finance programs.

For some of the young AP and DC volunteers who worked in Coopop in the first 2 years, the

experience was both exciting and frustrating; a great learning opportunity on the potential of

community development, and also a realization that effective development programs need more

funding and technical support than was available. Many of these volunteers envisioned new and

expanded forms of Coopop for a future government more committed to grass-root development.

Similarly, many of the young military officers who participated in the successful campaign against

the various 1965 guerilla movements, and especially those who had also taken social science

courses from MSP and DC professors at CAEM, saw Coopop as the basis for something much

bigger and greater, a government program which would simultaneously bring government to the

grass roots, and mobilize grass-root support for government. This line of thinking culminated in

the establishment of Sinamos in 1971, the high point of military radicalism.

Velasco’s early speeches, written by Carlos Delgado, a former Aprista who served as advisor to

the President, promised to liberate ordinary Peruvians from poverty, servitude and imperialism

(Velasco, 1972), seeking a ‘‘third way’’ between capitalism and communism, a peaceful revolution

based on cooperatives, corporatism and the civic ideals of the military. The flagship program was

agrarian reform, which rapidly transferred the large estates and plantations to peasant and worker

cooperatives. Major plantations belonging to transnational corporations were expropriated and

converted to worker cooperatives, and major mines were expropriated and transformed into state

corporations. Power production, irrigation and industrialization schemes were launched in the

hope of accelerating economic development, and programs were announced to gradually convert

government and private corporations to ‘‘social property companies’’ with worker participation

in ownership and management. Peru’s shanty towns were officially renamed from barriadas, a

negative term implying peripheral slums, to pueblos jovenes, ‘‘young towns’’, a positive expression

of hope and progress. Two months after taking power Velasco established ONDEPJOV, the

National Office for Young Towns, to promote aided self-help.

Peru’s conservative elites were outraged at the military government’s rhetoric and policies, and

Beltr!an (1976) and Bela !unde (Chirinos 1987, p. 97) both denounced Velasco’s revolution as anti-

democratic, statist, corrupt, abusive of human rights, and hopelessly inefficient. Nevertheless, in

its early years, Velasco’s government enjoyed considerable popular support, and up to 1973 the

national economy performed well while world prices for Peru’s major commodity exports were

rising (Thorp & Bertram, 1978, p. 305).

Sinamos was advised and largely designed by Carlos Delgado, but it was headed by military

officers. It was created by fusing a variety of urban, rural and regional development and public

works agencies, including ONDEPJOV and what remained of Coopop, and it had an elaborate

system of regional and local offices. A civilian staff worked under the military leadership, drawing

mainly on the staff of the agencies absorbed by Sinamos, and on radical advisors, researchers,

trainers and writers, many of them previously identified with centre-left political groups. The

name Sinamos was both an acronym for National System of Support for Social Mobilization, and

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292286

a play on the words ‘‘sin amos’’, which translate as ‘‘without masters’’, symbolizing the liberation

of the poor majority of Peruvians from oligarchic rule and feudal exploitation.

The trigger for the establishment of Sinamos came in 1971 when a major land invasion in Lima

was relocated from Pamplona to create Villa el Salvador, a massive sites and services scheme on

the southern periphery of the city (Dietz, 1980, p. 27). Building on that experience, Sinamos

assumed prime responsibility for government policy towards shanty towns. Delgado’s (1973,

1974, 1976) vision for Sinamos was an integral part of his broader vision for Velasco’s

revolutionary government. He believed that strong central power, suppressing traditional

democratic mechanisms, was essential to expropriate property from local elites and transnational

corporations, and to transfer that property to the people. He argued that such property should

not be assigned to individuals, but should be owned and used by the community. In the case of

agriculture and industry, it should be ‘‘social property’’ organized into cooperative groups, which

could share, manage and increase production. In the case of housing, it might be cooperative or

leasehold, with restrictions on sale to prevent speculation and gentrification. He placed great

emphasis on group decision-making for management and planning of enterprises and settlements,

and on the availability of technical assistance from Sinamos experts. His ambitious vision for

Sinamos needed much more budget than the agency actually received, and at least a decade of

largely top-down management so as to organize and educate the grass-root participants. His hope

in the long-term was that the socially mobilized settlements and enterprises would eventually form

a bottom-up system of political participation, canalizing the people’s views to the highest levels of

government and ensuring democracy through corporatist representation in functional organiza-

tions.

Delgado’s vision for Sinamos as a means to gradually shift Peru from a top-down authoritarian

system to a bottom-up participatory democracy was bold but na.ıve. It is almost inconceivable that

a military government, based on the tradition of strict command and control, could gradually

evolve into a people’s democracy. Within Peru, Velasco’s government was strongly criticized from

both left and right. The traditional political parties resented being displaced, the electoral

democratic system had been overthrown, and local elites and transnational corporations were

bitter about the loss of their property. Leftist unions, parties and revolutionary groups resented

the military’s cooptation of radical rhetoric. The US government and transnational corporations

were fearful that similar regimes could take power in other countries, nationalizing foreign

investments, threatening private property, and propagating a dangerous tercermondiste rhetoric

which could lead many countries to stop paying interest on their international debts.

Most of Peru’s military leaders were more conservative than Velasco, and even Velasco

probably did not share Delgado’s idealism. What was important in the early years was to use

radical and redistributive rhetoric to win popular support, expressed through cheering crowds at

public rallies, and Sinamos was given the main role of enlisting the general public and providing

free transport, food and other benefits to win their favour. Nevertheless, by 1975 Velasco’s

government had lost much of its early support. The press and some television channels and radio

stations were under government control, often appearing as a crude propaganda machine (Booth,

1983). The President’s health was failing, the economy was stagnating as demand for Peru’s

exports diminished and key commodity prices fell, and some of the cooperative institutions

established in the agrarian reform and social property programs were proving to be remarkably

inefficient. Advisors to cooperative enterprises were often corrupt or incompetent, and the reality

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292 287

of popular participation was falling far behind the rhetoric. The people were mobilized in support

of government programs, but their real voices and concerns often went unheard.

From its beginnings, Sinamos was a controversial and underfunded agency. It lost influence as

the economic situation and Velasco’s hold on power weakened after 1973, it was further weakened

when Velasco was overthrown by General Morales Berm !udez in 1975, and it was finally abolished

in 1977. There are many different interpretations of what Sinamos was, and what it was intended

to become (Collier, 1975, pp. 152–160). To the radicals in Velasco’s government, Sinamos was a

corporatist means to mobilize support for the President and to guarantee the support base of the

revolution, and it would eventually develop into new form of peoples’ democracy. To more

conservative elements in the military, however, it demonstrated how Velasco’s revolution was

getting out of control, and could lead to popular uprisings against authoritarian rule. Many

representatives of the old political parties saw Sinamos as an attempt by the military to found their

own political movement, and eventually to create a party apparatus or even a one-party state.

Some observers saw it as a weak government agency intended to coordinate public works and

communal projects in rural areas and urban shanty towns, but unable to respond to more than a

small proportion of the needs for such projects throughout the country. Others saw it as a crude

attempt to extend the governmental apparatus into every community, and to inventory, authorize

and control all organizations, meetings and political activities.

6. Conclusion: John Turner on the middle ground

John Turner’s philosophy of aided self-help and dweller control of housing has abundant

parallels in the writings and projects of such earlier figures as Patrick Geddes (Tyrwhitt, 1947),

Ernst May (Henderson, 1990) and Jacob Crane (Harris, 1997, 1998). In Peru, Turner’s

work paralleled and interacted with the perceptions and concerns of local observers, and it

occupied a middle ground. He argued that Bela !unde’s apartment complexes and Beltr!an’s

residential subdivisions were too expensive to satisfy popular demand, and that much more

could be achieved for those in greatest need by a nationwide program of government support for

communal projects and initiatives, including small public works, infrastructure and land-titling.

Bela !unde’s Coopop and Beltr!an’s developer sites and services schemes were significant steps

towards this middle ground. In contrast, Delgado’s Sinamos tried to go far beyond what Turner

envisaged, creating a complex, hierarchical structure which seemed oriented to social control, but

which was supposed to lead to an unprecedented system of people’s democracy.

The Peruvian shanty-town upgrading process under Velasco is wonderfully summarized by

Rodr!ıguez, Riofr!ıo, and Welsh (1971) in their book De Invasores a Invadidos, ‘‘From Invaders to

Invaded’’ and in the follow-up volume (Riofr!ıo & Rodr!ıguez, 1980). These books explain how

during the 1960s and 1970s Lima squatter settlements became more and more documented,

advised, regulated and controlled by government agencies. The barriadas were gradually co-opted

with ‘‘aid’’ to their self-help activities, so that successive governments could monitor and control

local leadership, implement low-cost local development programs, and build political support for

their regime. Meanwhile, opposition parties encouraged non-participation in government

programs for existing barriadas, and they sometimes supported or organized new squatter

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292288

invasions to create barriadas in direct opposition to the current regime (Collier, 1975, p. 136). The

barriadas were, and still are, highly politicized environments.

The worldwide diffusion of Turner’s ideas and writings in the 1960s, and the subsequent

mushrooming of his reputation in the 1970s as the pre-eminent authority on low-income housing

in developing countries, is more related to the origins and timing of his ideas than to their

radicalism or originality. Studies of Peruvian barriadas by Turner and Mangin helped to build and

widen knowledge of rapid urbanization, the social and physical conditions in shanty towns,

and the ways in which self-help and community development might be harnessed in

neighbourhood upgrading. Turner and Mangin’s works hit mainstream architecture and

anthropology in the United States and other Anglophone countries just as interest in Third

World shanty towns was mushrooming. Theirs were not the first studies, or the experiences which

formed United Nations, World Bank or Alliance for Progress policy, but they were timely, brief

and highly graphic. They supported what seemed a new academic discovery at the time, that the

rapidly expanding shanty towns of third world cities were mainly neighbourhoods of optimism

and progress, rather than festering slums of despair. The barriada development process in Lima

and other coastal Peruvian cities was a striking example of how poor and middle-income people

could obtain private property without apparently harming the rights of more privileged groups.

Though squatting was illegal, it seemed like a victimless crime, which increased stability and

satisfied basic needs.

At the height of the Cold War, when books like Latin America: Reform or Revolution? (Petras &

Zeitlin, 1968), The Rape of the Peasantry (Feder, 1971) and Open Veins of Latin America

(Galeano, 1973) were required reading, the barriada story that Turner and Mangin told so vividly

provided a new sense of optimism based on the power of the human spirit and the value of hard

work, self-help and community collaboration. Closer study of the Peruvian case in the late 1960s

and early 1970s, focusing on the weakness of Coopop and the demise of Sinamos, might have

revealed a different picture. Since the early 1950s, barriada development had provided abundant

opportunities for political patronage and clientelism to a variety of regimes (Collier, 1976),

enabling governments to favour their supporters and squatters to trade their support for land

rights. Coopop and Sinamos provide vibrant examples of the serious problems which aided self-

help housing policies must confront: the struggle of political parties and the military to control

and co-opt popular participation; the fears of military and economic elites that grass-root

community development may lead to revolution; the inefficiency and self-interest of central

government bureaucracy when dealing with thousands of small, local problems across a large

national territory; and, the problems of coordination and implementation which result when

major national public works programs require local participation in planning and implemen-

tation.

In many senses, a ‘‘national aided self-help housing policy’’ is a contradiction in terms,

emphasizing top-down decision-making instead of grass-root empowerment, creating great

potential for bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption, and turning community development into a

party political or civil–military battle for the hearts, minds, votes and applause of the masses.

Around the mid-point of Velasco’s government, the most ambitiously statist regime in Peru’s

history, Turner and Fichter published Freedom to Build, a collection of essays intended to span the

world, rather than to focus on Peru. On the very first page, they wrote: ‘‘The urgency of a basic

shelter problem cannot be ignored; but neither the shelter problem nor the manifold social

R. Bromley / Habitat International 27 (2003) 271–292 289

problems of which it is a part can be solved by bureaucratically administered, politically imposed

programs’’ (Turner & Fichter, 1972, p. 8). The complex history of housing policy in Peru between

1957 and 1977 demonstrates the wisdom of this statement. Peru’s principal problem was, and still

is, political centralism seeking to co-opt and control local initiatives. Successive national

governments of different ideological tendencies have done little to change this fundamental

characteristic of the nation. Peru has been a fount of ideas and innovation in housing policy, but

visitors are still struck by the harsh living conditions and poor housing of most of the Peruvian

population.

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